Nielsen TV Ratings Will Soon Include Viewers Who Watch Online

Nielsen is making moves to include online TV watching in its ratings system. Image courtesy Nielsen

It’s not news — to savvy media viewers, at least — that people like to watch TV online, through a range of devices including consoles, tablets, laptops, and computers hooked up to TVs. Now the television ratings company Nielsen is finally getting hip to the program, announcing today that they plan to expand their definition of “TV” to include viewers watching TV over broadband.

The new definition of a “TV household,” as Nielsen explained to its clients today, is any household with “at least one operable TV/monitor with the ability to deliver video via traditional means of antennae, cable [set-top box] or satellite receiver and/or with broadband connection.” In short, “cord cutters” could one day become Nielsen families.

“Nielsen’s objective is to measure video content however consumers access it,” Pat McDonough, Nielsen’s senior vice president of insights and analysis, said in a statement. “In the last decade, the places and ways consumers can view content have grown significantly. Over the last 12 months, Nielsen has explored expanding the current definition of a TV household to more accurately reflect media consumption and technology advancements.”

The ratings firm also did research, said McDonough, into homes that did not fit into the current definition of a Nielsen household and found that while a lot of them had televisions, they were using broadband to stream their content. With more and more people catching up on shows through online services like Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime and Netflix — most of which are available through connected consoles like the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the Wii — it’s a move that eventually could give a broader picture of how popular a show truly is.

That tracks with a 2012 report by market research company NPD, which found that the number of consumers who used the TV as their primary screen for watching streaming video rose from 33 percent to 45 percent over the previous year. By the time the next big fall TV season begins, Nielsen hopes to be able to measure viewership from streaming services on the 23,000 TV homes it samples, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which added that Nielsen hopes to be able to include video viewing on the iPad by the end of the year.

Nielsen’s move, however, doesn’t mean that it could necessarily provide exact ratings for Netflix, so don’t expect viewership numbers for House of Cards. Instead, the Reporter noted, would be able to report how much time is spent on Netflix viewing. To trace a particular show, Netflix would have to encode its signals so Nielsen could identify them, the way traditional TV networks do. (Netflix declined to comment for this piece, but in the past has noted they don’t have much interest in traditional ratings.)

Even though at present Nielsen’s move seems geared toward getting better and more well-rounded viewership numbers for the shows it already tracks, its acknowledgement of online viewing as part of the big picture for TV viewership could have big implications for online-only programming. In the future if advertisers and sponsors got a taste of online viewing analytics, they may never go back, said Sean Stewart — one of the founders of Fourth Wall Studios, which currently offers content only on its proprietary Rides.tv platform.

“Nielsen had to do this, of course, because sooner or later business models have to change to reflect how today’s audience really consumes entertainment,” Stewart said in an email to Wired. “Obviously, Fourth Wall Studios, and any other producer of online content, welcomes any tool that gives sponsors a chance to make apples-to-apples audience comparisons between our programs and traditional broadcast television.”

In its statement, Nielsen said that the move is just one step “on the path to capturing all viewing in homes” and that it will continue to expand how it measures television audience. So maybe, one day, that Hulu Plus New Girl cram session you squeeze in on the bus to work will actually count for something, and the idea of a Nielsen “household” will be a thing of the past.